...so let me see...LOL.
Actually the song for today was "Kickstart My Heart".
BIKE: 3:43 and 64.5 miles on the MCT system. All flat, lots of HR pacing to compare to yesterday's ride.
My original plans to ride with some Taters fell through this morning, and probably for the better. If riding in a group I'd be tempted to go outside my comfort zone in my first real outdoor post-injury ride. I knew that if I stayed to flats and rode alone it would be boring but probably better for me in the end.
Better for me? It was. Boring. Oh yeah, it was. The MCT is like a highway for bikes, I love it except for it's 99% flat terrain. But this set me up to see what 125bpm outdoors felt like compared to yesterday's 125 bpm indoors.
The day was gorgeous! Happy Easter to everyone! The ride started out with honeysuckle, some deer, a fox...and pollen. My eyes were itching, and by the end of the ride my nose was raw from wiping and blowing my nose.
In the end, 125-130 outdoors (which was my ave HR in the end) is working moderately hard but a very maintainable pace. There was some headwind adding to the work, but that was it. No hills to climb and/or recover from. I think this might be a good indicator for my "forever" pace. Keeping in mind that I was tired from Saturday, and suffering tight knees from Friday's elliptical session (never thought that would hurt so much...), this is some good data.
The ankle was taped with paper tape stirrup and a high ankle binding. Worked great, no problems!
The plan was to do 65-ish and make it a 100 mile weekend of biking. I also wanted to see at what time I hit 56 miles, the HIM distance. Disappointingly, 56 miles came around 3:12. Ok, Ok, I wasn't hammering the entire time and many times I had myself settle/slow to focus on HR, so this wasn't a fair test for that. But one problem was that I didn't eat enough in the last third of the ride and just crumped out with 5 miles to go.
Here I was, buzzing along, on the last section of trail, going back and forth on how I felt and how I thought my progress was so far for IMCDA prep. One minute I'm thinking 'wow this 60 miles is great, I could do it again' and the next minute it's 'thankfully I'm not doing it again gawds I'm tired', and the next minute it's 'I don't have to be IM ready today, so it's OK to be tired', and the next minute to 'only 70-some days!!'
Flip flopping in my own mind, back and forth, losing and gaining motivation tenth by tenth of a mile. Yup, that's a nutrition fail. I needed to eat more. I told myself that I was soooooo close to the truck, that I ate a big breakfast and the energy was on board just not available, and that this might be good practice in how to stay focused when focus is elusive. In the end, it worked out only because I wasn't running or racing. Under those conditions this would have been a huge fail. I ate 900 calories on the ride, I just ate too much at the beginning instead of spreading it out nicely.
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